More defense vendors, please

In 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin invited more than a dozen CEOs of big weapons and aerospace companies to dinner at the Pentagon. In what has become known as the Last Supper, he shocked them by saying that, with the end of the Cold War, America had too many defense contractors and that the companies needed to merge or die. Merge they did. But 15 years later, as the fiasco with the Air Force's tanker contract and widespread Pentagon procurement dysfunction demonstrate, it's not clear that fewer contractors is better. Monopoly-like power exercised by a few dominant vendors is no better, it turns out, in the defense industry than it is in software, electricity or cable TV. The next president ought to consider undoing what Aspin wrought and spurring a Ma Bell-like breakup of dominant defense companies. The tanker contract,... [read full story]